Report: Twitter pays $40 million for TweetDeck

When it comes to client software, Twitter has been known to buy someone else’s creation than build its own. For example, last year the microblogging service bought Atebits, maker of Tweetie for iPhone and Macintosh.

TweetDeck is one of the most popular Twitter clients, though solid statistics are hard to come by. TwitStat was tracking them until August of last year, and at that time, TweetDeck was No. 2, right behind Twitter’s own website. It’s certainly a favorite of power users, who rely on TweetDeck’s multi-column view to track mentions, lists, trending topics and more at a glance.

Until now, Twitter’s taste in clients has run to the lean and elegant. Its iPhone, Android and Mac clients are known for their simple, clean designs. But TweetDeck is much more complex, and can be a challenge to master. Still, for those who need a serious tool to interact with and monitor Twitter, it’s worth the effort.

But given past trends, TweetDeck users may have reason to be concerned. The company has stripped out useful features from its clients. For example, it removed Tweetie’s ability to work with third-party URL shorteners, forcing users to rely on Twitter’s t.co service, which provides no analytics. TweetDeck has built-in support for four different shorteners, and you can manually add others.

Twitter also removed support from Tweetie for so-called extended tweet services, which allow you to write more than 140 characters. While I personally think these servicesrun counter to the very thing that makes Twitter compelling – its brevity and simplicity – there are those who like and rely on them. TweetDeck has a built-in tweet extension feature called deck.ly, and it could be endangered.

In addition, TweetDeck has the ability to pull in updates from some of Twitter’s competitors. You can add columns for Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn. Would Twitter want to keep that ability in future versions of TweetDeck?

Neither TweetDeck nor Twitter has confirmed the sale, and I’m anxious to see just what Twitter says about the future of the software. There are those who speculate that the only reason that Twitter bought TweetDeck was to keep it out of the hands of a potential rival, UberMedia, which had been rumored to be in acquisition talks earlier this year. But I think the acquisition makes some sense for several reasons.

First, Twitter has no client that runs on Windows, the largest desktop operating system. While TweetDeck isn’t a native Windows client, it does give Twitter entré to that platform.

Second, Twitter is clearly intending to make money through advertising, and TweetDecks’ column-based interface provides many points of entry for ads.

Finally, Twitter’s existing clients aren’t really aimed at serious, professional users of social media. TweetDeck puts Twitter in that arena in a big way.

If Twitter continues to develop TweetDeck with an eye toward power and sophistication – and adds compelling features, rather than removing them – this could be a great move for the software’s users. But if Twitter behaves as it has in the past, TweetDeck will be just another piece of software that Twitter has made less useful.

Update: If you’re a Twitter user who’s never tried TweetDeck, there’s a way you can sample the interface without actually installing the client. If you use Google’s Chrome browser, you can runthe TweetDeck Web app. If you don’t use Chrome, you can apply to be part of the limited beta that lets the Web version run on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

While they don’t have all the features of the AIR client version, it will give you a feel for how TweetDeck works.